Insanity
by WMisc
Summary: It all started with a single innocent statement, designed merely to understand the depth of one's love, and instead brought into light the secrets another had been withholding.


_A one-shot about our dear Angela's secret... the real world. Cue dramatic music._

* * *

**Insanity**

* * *

It all started with a single innocent statement, designed merely to understand the depth of one's love, and instead brought into light the secrets another had been withholding.

"Honey, I think we should get a divorce."

Gill, pale-haired, blue-eyed, looked up, pen poised to form more words in his battered diary–journal, he preferred to call it. "What's that, dear?" he inquired absently, mind still on how to express his thoughts on paper.

"I think we should get a divorce."

Angela, brown-haired, brown-eyed, scrutinized her husband anxiously for his reaction. Beforehand, she had thought things out, predicting the possible effect the sentence could wreak on him. She'd spent time wondering how to approach him on the subject, how to make it seem like she was serious.

She really was no great actor, but she figured that she could do a good enough job to make it seem believable. She had full confidence in her reasoning.

She was not, however, prepared for what her husband did next.

Gill frowned, the customary crease in his forehead caused by stress deepening. He sighed–by his wife's tone of voice, he'd actually thought that she had had something important to say to him. He pressed the tip of the pen to the lined paper once more, admonishing inattentively, "Not now, Angela, I'm not in the mood for your antics."

Angela was outraged. Here she was, thinking she was doing a good job of pretending she was serious, and he just blows off her words like they were just pleasantries. "I'm serious!" Not.

He sighed again and closed the book with a snap. He placed it on a nearby side table, and, rubbing his eyes wearily, spoke. "Well, then, go on."

She was stumped for the briefest of moments. She hadn't prepared for this part. Stumbling over the words, she stammered, "Er, uh, well, I was thinking that we… we should get a divorce?"

The way she said it made it out to be a question, and she hoped her husband wouldn't take it that way.

His wife was even more deranged than usual today. Gill inspected her clinically. She _looked_ healthy enough, but that really wasn't the issue. He decided to phrase his query as carefully as possible. "Dear, as much as I would love to state my opinion on the matter, I first must ask something: what exactly _is_ a divorce?"

Silence.

Finally, when Angela managed to reply, her tone was one of incredulity. "Are you serious?" she exclaimed. If her husband was supposedly the smarter one, then that didn't say much for her.

"Perfectly serious."

She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Nothing came out.

This lasted for quite a few minutes.

Gill was really starting to wonder what was wrong with his wife. Maybe his father had traumatized her again. He shuddered at the mental image that popped up and gently shook her shoulder. "Angela?"

It took her a while to respond, but when she did, the first thing out of her mouth was, "Are you serious?"

"I believe I answered that already."

"You don't know what a divorce is?" she asked, then rolling her eyes in a fit of scorn, added, "And you say you're the smarter one."

That stung. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the remark. Normally, he would've waved it off and laughed, but this time, he could tell that she was being serious. "Just tell me what a divorce is."

"I just cannot believe you don't know what a divorce is, I mean, you of all people-"

He gave up. "Fine!" he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air in surrender. "I'm just going to go find out what a divorce is, since I'm so stupid!"

After that eloquent statement, he stomped out the door, muttering to himself the whole way.

* * *

"Father, I'm worried about Angela."

Gill stood in front of his father, both uncomfortable with the topic of his wife. The last time Hamilton had spoken to her beyond mere greetings, he'd practically scarred her for life. Needless to say, Angela tended to avoid her father-in-law as much as possible.

Hamilton was careful to make his voice neutral when he spoke. "Why? What's wrong?"

He didn't fall for it, but decided to ignore his father's bad acting abilities. He hesitated, and then slowly said, "Well… Angela is sort of… silly, as you know. But I would never call her… _insane_. But now… I might be rethinking that statement." He glanced at Hamilton, who was utterly absorbed in scuffing the floor with his shoe. Gill refrained from scolding him or sighing and instead continued, "She said that we should get a _divorce_."

"What's a divorce?"

"I know! That's exactly what I said!" Gill exclaimed, rubbing his temples. "And then she didn't believe me."

Hamilton pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Yes, we may have to have Jin look at her… but then again, maybe she's just making up random words… does she do that often?" he asked as an afterthought.

Gill nodded reluctantly. "…Yes. Well, then, I'll wait. If she persists in this, I'll have Jin examine her." He grimaced at the idea. "Thank you."

He left.

* * *

For the next few days, Gill watched his wife carefully. When she didn't show any signs of insanity besides talking to the farm animals, the wild animals, and the strange flowers sprouting by each one of the supposed Harvest Sprite's trees, he decided that it was best to ignore the situation for the moment and live life the way he had been before the whole thing.

His decision lasted exactly four and a half hours.

Gill was woken up at midnight by his wife's shrieks. He flew out of bed, an arm raised as if to fend off an invisible enemy. His eyelids were still half-closed with drowsiness, but he still managed to mumble, when it seemed that nobody was harming her, "What…? What is it, Angela?"

Angela was still squealing with joy, bouncing on the bed repeatedly as she waved above her head wildly, pointing at something. Gill squinted up, but all he saw was the dark ceiling. He frowned in confusion. "What?"

His wife sighed impatiently, brown eyes still alight in happiness and triumph. "Oh, Gill, don't you see it?" she exclaimed, tilting her head back to stare up at the ceiling. "It says–right here, look!–that the stuff I found in the mines today was worth eleven-thousand, five-hundred and ninety-eight gold! Oh, Gill, isn't that great?"

Her husband was alarmed. Again, he inspected the ceiling for something he might have missed. All he saw was the dark purple ceiling. "Dear, I don't see anything," he said wearily. "Why don't we go to sleep?"

Angela got that mulish look in her eyes that Gill knew so well. "Gill, why aren't you happy for me?" she asked angrily, sounding a lot like Maya when in one of her moods. He resisted the urge to back away slowly as she continued, still bouncing, still gesturing above her at the air, "I mean, _look_! It's right here! I'll show you!"

And without warning, she grabbed Gill's hand and towed him over to the bed and forced his head up to look at the ceiling.

"Do you see it _now_?"

Gill nodded helplessly, feeling that there was nothing he could do to convince her that he really couldn't see anything. Besides, he could practically feel the bruises forming from where Angela's hands had been. _Must be all that farm work,_ he thought privately.

His wife was abruptly joyful once more. "Well, then, we'll celebrate tomorrow! Good night, Gill!"

She fell back onto her pillow and was asleep in seconds.

Gill sat there, sides aching. His mind was made up now. He just wondered how Angela would react to this change of plans…

* * *

Jin was reading in his office, sipping a cup of herbal tea, a book called _Parenting_. On parenting, obviously. Anissa was one season pregnant, and he'd wanted to make sure of all the basics before the child actually came.

As his eyes came to the chapter appropriately titled 'Children and You–How to Interact with Them', the phone rang shrilly.

Without lifting his eyes from the page, he reached over with his free hand and picked up the receiver. "Meringue Clinic, Jin speaking."

"Jin? Oh, good. This is Gill," the harried voice spoke.

"Gill?" Jin set his half-empty cup on the desk in front of him and lowered the book in his hands so he could fully concentrate on the conversation. "Well, you've never called us before. Is Angela alright?" He'd always had a fondness for Angela–she was like the little sister he'd never had.

It was silent on the end for a moment, then the sound of a door closing. Then his voice came on, the words tumbling out hastily. "Ah… that's actually what I'm calling about."

"What? What's wrong? Is she okay?" Jin asked anxiously, wondering what could've made Gill sound so uncollected, so agitated.

"Well…" Gill trailed off, and for a moment, there was a sound that made Jin suspect he was sighing. "I think it'd be best if I told you when we're face to face… make it sound more believable," he added under his breath, so low that Jin could barely hear it. He realized he probably wasn't meant to hear it and didn't comment.

"Alright, then, I think I will see you in a half-hour, Gill. Of course, bring Angela with you." Jin hesitated, then asked in an undertone, "Tell me, though… is… whatever's wrong with Angela, er, dangerous?"

"…Possibly."

The concerned crease embedded in Jin's forehead deepened. "Right. Well. I'll see you at… nine. Good-bye."

He hung up.

* * *

"Gill, why are we here? I wanted to go to the Sundae Inn to celebrate!" Angela complained as she was towed along by her husband to the Meringue Clinic.

Although he hated lying to his wife, it was sometimes necessary. Like now. "Er, we're just going to tell Jin and Irene the good, er, good news," he quickly improvised, ignoring the few stares he received from the various townspeople.

Angela, satisfied with the thought of sharing her joy with more people, stopped sulking and began to walk on her own feet.

At exactly nine in the morning, the door to the Meringue Clinic opened, and the two, one looking extremely hassled, the other looking extremely cheerful, stumbled in.

Jin and Irene immediately approached them. Upon seeing them, Angela automatically announced, "The table that tells me how much money I earned that day that appears whenever I go to sleep told me I got more than ten-thousand gold yesterday!" When nobody replied to her statement, she added, "And the five Harvest Sprites were dancing around, celebrating as well, and the word 'CONGRATULATIONS!' appeared in big, block letters like there is on Word Art!"

The three bystanders were perplexed–Jin and Irene more than Gill, not having been around her for so long. They blinked at the same time. Utter nonsense was spilling out from Angela's mouth–what in the world was 'Word Art'?

"Angela," Gill said cautiously, "do you want to go upstairs to, er…"

"…Help me find a bottle of medicine I need?" Irene quickly filled in. When Angela nodded, the former grabbed her arm and dragged her upstairs, ignoring her protests about how she could walk perfectly fine on her own.

The two left stared up after her. Jin said unnecessarily, "She's acting very strange today."

"Yes."

There was another pause, Jin thinking, Gill waiting impatiently for his verdict. Finally, the black-haired doctor spoke. "I mean, she _looks_ perfectly fine, but… do you think there's something wrong with her, ah, mind?"

"You mean like a mind disease? A disability?" Gill considered it. "It's possible… since the day I met her, she was always spouting something about how one day, she'd be married to me. I didn't believe her then, but look at me now." He chuckled quietly. "But it was like she could predict my movements… the second I stepped outside the town hall at five, she was there. It was like she had some guide that told her exactly when I would enter the town hall, when I would leave, what I did on my days off, where I went…"

Both laughed uneasily.

"But she's been acting like this for a while. Even before we were married. She was always talking about something I never understood, she was always at festivals at the exact time the people she needed to buy things from came, like she had schedules written down of what she did… that's the most remarkable thing. She was practically able to predict things that would happen in the future. She'd predicted that on the first of summer, the tailor shop would come, on the fifteenth of summer, that archaeologist would arrive, the first of fall, Chase would be here, and so on… like she had some power over her life with some _guide_ or something.

"I mean, a few days ago, she told me she thought we should get a _divorce_. I mean, I don't know what a divorce is. Do you know what a divorce is?" Without waiting for Jin's answer, he continued, now on a roll, "I don't. I mean, she's always talking to the animals around us, talking to this odd flower by Daren's tree in the town square and bringing it presents… last time, I saw her dumping water on it. That's fine, but then I also noticed her putting a carp right next to it. Who gives a flower a _fish_?"

Jin took the opportunity, while Gill was gasping for breath, to cut in. "That sounds serious," he said, pushing his small glasses further up his nose. "I think I'll have to examine her, ask her a few questions… and then we'll see if she's all right."

They both nodded, and Gill was about to say something when they heard a piercing scream from upstairs.

Gill rushed up, Jin on his heels, to see before them a horrifying sight.

Not.

Angela backed away from Irene, brown eyes wide, mouth in the shape of an 'o'. Irene advanced slowly, something in her right hand as she shuffled forward. "Now, dear, I'm only going to sedate you," she soothed, voice a bit too strained for comfort. "It'll be relaxing…"

Jin leapt forward and clamped a hand on Irene's arm. "Irene! What are you doing?"

"I'm only sedating her, Jin! She wouldn't stop talking about some nonsense… I decided the most logical thing to do would be to anesthetize her!"

Angela chose that time to jump in with a terrified, "I swear! It's true! I _did_ see that table that tells me how much money I made that day, I _do_ see that little chart that's in the upper left-hand corner of my mind that tells me what season it is, what's the current weather, and what time and day it is, and I most definitely do see my picture in the bottom right-hand corner of my mind with the stamina bar!"

Gill and Jin looked at each other, utterly confused.

"Jin! You believe me, right?" Angela's voice was getting panicked now. "I mean, here, I'll prove it to you! Let's see… your baby will be a boy, and his name is going to be… Van! And since today is exactly one season from your wedding, Anissa will be rushed in by Perry, and she'll be in labor!"

The men were about to wave it off, but at that moment, Perry sprinted inside, yelling, "Doctor Jin! Anissa's in labor!"

* * *

Anissa lay in the hospital bed, exhausted but happy. She watched as her husband inspected the child. "It's… a boy," he proclaimed, stunned.

Anissa didn't notice any of his amazement. "I think I'll call him… Van," she said softly. Weary from her efforts, she quickly slipped into a deep sleep afterwards.

Jin sat there, frozen. Gill was in the same position, sitting by Angela's bed, where she lay, sedated.

Suddenly, Angela's voice piped up, "See? I'm not crazy!"

She made a move to spring out of bed, but in an instant, Gill was over her, pinning her arms to the bed. He nodded and said over his shoulder, "Jin?"

"Right here." Smoothly, he switched places with him and carefully anesthetized her, feeling bad as he did so. Angela's resistance became futile, half-hearted, and gradually, they ceased.

Gill wondered if she could still answer him. "Angela?" he asked softly. "Dear?"

A slurred, "Huh?" came from the bed.

He swallowed. "I think… I think we should get a divorce."

* * *

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own, nor will I ever.

_A random bit of randomness that had formed out of a random bit of randomness. Dramatic music is welcome._


End file.
